Mechanical parking meters were originally thought to be a satisfactory means of regulating the flow of traffic in busy urban areas as well as providing much needed revenue to these communities. However, in actual practice, it has been found that many of these parking meters have not lived up to their expectations because of a high incidence of vandalism. Further problems have arisen through the use of counterfeit tokens and coins, plus a constant need for checking and repair. Thus, it has often been found that the high cost of maintaining the mechanical meters has totally negated the purpose for which they were originally intended to be used. As a result, many communities today are allowing the parking meter system to deteriorate through attrition so that it no longer adequately controls the flow of traffic.
Various parking ticket systems have been proposed, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,839,854, 3,528,186 and 3,966,232, to be used in place of parking meter systems. The cards used in these systems are relatively inconvenient to use in that they require writing on or tearing off various portions of the card. A more important problem occurs in the prevention of counterfeiting and reuse of these cards. Supposedly non-readable torn off sections may be repatched on, and slow fading inks enable uncontrollable abuse of the system.